The present invention is related to Uniform Resource Locator (URL) mapping, and more specifically to URL virtual naming and metadata mapping.
With current Internet routing, Domain Naming System (DNS) servers exist to provide a mapping of hostnames (e.g., www.electroniccity.com) to Internet Protocol (IP) address locations for the correct routing of the URL addresses to the appropriate server. When the address is qualified, for example: www.electroniccity.com/tv the unqualified URL (i.e., www.electroniccity.com) is used by DNS to locate the appropriate server, then that server resolves the “/tv” to a particular 2-dimensional (2D) web page that is then displayed in the user's browser. This poses a major flaw with 3-dimensional (3D) virtual world routing because 3D virtual world locations are not pages, but specific locations in a virtual world. These locations are typically based on an x,y,z coordinate system.
An attempt to solve this is the SLURL made popular by the Second Life Virtual World. It is a non-standard URL scheme that contains specific x,y,z coordinates. For example: http://slurl.com/secondlife/ElectronicCity%20Tech/132/15/23 may specify the x,y,z position (132, 15, 23) on an Electronic City (virtual store) island of Second Life. This solution is problematic for several reasons. It is not compatible with the existing URL scheme, it requires two different URLs depending on if you want to visit the 2D page or the 3D world (which may be problematic in the future as 2D and 3D experiences merge), and the SLURL breaks down when you move the electronic city store from one x,y,z coordinate to another. Therefore, when anything a web user has “bookmarked” within the virtual world moves (such as moving the TV section of Electronic City to another floor), the bookmark is broken if the URL representing the bookmark contains virtual world address coordinates, as in the Second Life SLURL or similar scheme.